The weather was good with temperatures in the low 50’s °F – its often much colder at this time of year.
There were going to be 13 of us for Thanksgiving Dinner and as we wanted enough left overs to go round we’d decided to cook two turkeys. But how do you do that with only 1 oven? The answer is that you don’t
Instead you use two gas burners, two large “kettles” and more than 6 gallons of Peanut Oil.
Take your two “kettles” and having worked out how much oil to put in (by using water and your turkey) you fire up the gas and heat the oil to 350°F.
Once the oil is hot you carefully, and slowly, lower the turkey into the kettle:
You keep an eye on the oil temperature and adjust the gas flow as appropriate making sure it doesn’t go over 350°F
And cook for 3.5 minutes per pound.
So after 60 minutes we lifted the turkeys out and let them drain for a new minutes.
Then you take them inside, let them rest for 30 minutes and then carve and eat!
We’ve got a pretty good routine working for flying to America.
It starts with driving down to Heathrow the night before the flight and staying in a hotel close to the airport – usually the Park Inn as it does park and fly deals where you can get a room and 15 days of parking for under £120. Doing this has several advantages:
Doing it by coach on Saturday morning would mean leaving Cheltenham at some very silly time in the early morning.
If there are travel delays you are pretty much screwed
An early morning start doesn’t fit well with a day that involves landing in Maine at 5pm EST (so 10pm UK time).
So instead we leave town after an evening meal, and after the commuter rush has cleared, and if there are delays on route it doesn’t really matter. We still have to get up early but 5am is a lot less ridiculous than 2 or 3am. We then hop on the Hotel Hoppa and it’s 10 minutes to the terminal with no major dragging of luggage down miles of corridors.
The only real gamble is the airlines… usually they’re pretty good but this time United Airlines let us down a little – UA 922 on Saturday was a tired plane, and apart from the wifi streamed movies via their app or browser it was like flying in 2001… a fixed set of movies running on a fixed cycle on a tiny seat back display and pretty uninspiring food (chicken curry or a pasta dish) and they’d managed to heat the butter up so you got a pot of melted butter rather and a portion of butter … However the cabin crew were friendly and were very pro-active in providing soft drinks throughout the flight and the legroom wasn’t bad for economy class.
New Yotk Liberty has a slightly odd layout – you arrive at the International Terminal (B) and go through immigration and customs.. then you drop off your luggage before getting on the Sky Train and going to another terminal (A) where you go back through security to get to the departure gates. But when you fly the other way you get a shuttle from A to B and don’t have to go through security again… seems very odd but that’s how it is.
The 50 seater plane to Portland Maine was basic as you’d expect and the turbulence that had wobbled the Boeing on the way down through Maine shook the smaller craft round quite a lot and the final approach into Portland was a bit of a roller-coaster ride.
Norwich might not sound like an obvious destination for a weekend away from Cheltenham as it’s not the easiest place to get to but it is a trip worth doing if you like Real Ale ( or “Craft” beers for that matter ).
We left Cheltenham on the Friday morning of Race Week and we decided to head out of town up the A40 towards Oxford, which at least meant we were going against the mad flow of traffic which was tailing back over a mile even at 10am.
The satnav decided that the fastest route was down to London and then back up again which seemed a little mad so with some minor tweaking we managed to persuade it otherwise and so we found ourselves in Woburn at lunch time. Woburn has decided that offering a large free car park is a sensible way to persuade people to stop and have a look round, and it obviously works as there were a lot of people wandering around.
Woburn village centre
We had lunch in the Caprioli tea rooms which was very enjoyable, before getting back in the car and continuing across country to Norwich.
We were staying in the Premier Inn right in the centre of city on Duke Street, which worked extremely well for exploring the city and its many and varied pubs, and when I say many I mean a serious number : the 2015 City of Ale celebration involves 50 pubs and that is only some of the real ale pubs in the city.
Be Er – at The Rose Inn
Looking at that list shows that over the weekend we barely scratched the surface of what the city has to offer in terms of pubs and beers. But what was as equally astounding was the fact that pubs selling more than 6 real ales were quite common and some had an extremely impressive range – Fat Cat (12 hand pumps plus gravity), The Duke of Wellington had over 20 beers on hand pump and on gravity and over the course of the weekend none of us had a pint of beer that wasn’t in extremely good condition. Throw in some Bar Billiards at The Kings Head and The White Lion and an excellent curry at Spice Paradise and you have the makings of a good weekend.
But there is more to Norwich than beer – it has a lot of history too and on Saturday morning we went for a long walk which involved doing a large portion of the Riverside walk which mixes the new riverside development ( the ‘Riverside Quarter’ ) near the Novi Sad Friendship bridge 1Norwich is twinned with Novi Sad
Novi Sad Friendship Bridge
with the old further up river near Pulls Ferry, where a stream used to leave the river and was used to transport stone used in the construction of the cathedral, and Cow Tower which got it’s name because they used to catapult cows from it 2This of course is NOT true
Pulls Ferry and WatergateCow Tower
There is, of course, also Mustard and the Coleman’s shop and museum in The Royal Arcade is well worth the visit and you can even try a variety of mustards before buying them.
Actually Norwich has several museums and Stranger’s Hall is a fascinating building and well worth a visit – but check the opening times as the website and the museum seemed to have different ideas on just when they were open.
The main entrance to Stranger’s Hall {the door at the lower level is the tradesman’s entrance)
But we couldn’t spend all the weekend in pubs drinking so on Sunday Morning we went over to Great Yarmouth and went for a walk along beach – it was extremely bracing.
I’m sure it doesn’t look as bleak when the sun is shining
I looked at what was over on canalplan blogs and decided that actually pulling the couple of live blogs over to here and closing down that site was the best thing to do.
So I exported and imported the posts along with the images and put a .htaccess rule to force 301 redirects over to here for my blog.
Once I’m sure things are working OK I’ll move the other blogs over.
One minute it was the start of January and the next it’s suddenly February and I’ve not posted anything anywhere.
I suppose the only positive thing I can say is that actually I did do a few things in January, the biggest was the now traditional annual pub crawl in Market Drayton with various friends. It’s a tradition that started many years ago when we kept the boat at Upton upon Severn and now its a pretty well planned event which usually takes place on the “Burns Night Weekend” and involves a lot of good beer, cheese, port and to wrap it all off a fry-up breakfast on the Sunday morning with various Scottish and Irish delicacies before everyone heads home.
So it’s 2015 and I thought that maybe I should start blogging properly. I’d already got my blog over on canalplan blogs but I got to thinking that maybe I should separate the two and make a blog site that any member of the family can have a blog on.
